State School Funding Methods

The legal authority for the maintenance and operation of public schools has rested with the fifty state governments since the ratification of the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution in 1791. Nonetheless, in most states, local communities initially assumed responsibility for financing and managing public schools. During the early years, the United States was primarily an agrarian nation composed of many small communities, most of which established rudimentary public schools during the common schools movement of the nineteenth century. The federal government did not provide revenue for the support of the newly formed common schools; however, as the number of states increased from the original 13 which declared their independence from England in 1776, each new state was required to ratify a state constitution containing a clause that mandated the establishment of a system of public schools. ¹ For administrative purposes, pursuant to the constitutional required systems of public schools, states arranged its public schools into geographical areas, usually referred to as school districts. Often, the boundaries of local governmental agencies, i.e., counties, cities, and townships, were made coterminous with the boundaries of the newly formed school districts. However, in some instances, particularly in the Midwest, school district boundaries crossed the boundaries of other local governmental agencies, a structure that has continued to the present. As recently as 1929–1930, nationally, there were approximately 120,000 public school districts that enrolled nearly 26 million students. By 2010–2011, the number of public school districts had fallen to 13,588 while the number of students enrolled had increased to approximately 49.6 million. ² Thus, over eight decades, the mean number of enrolled students per school district increased from 217 to 3,606. The reduction in the number of school districts and the concurrent increase in the number of students enrolled per school district were caused by several factors, most prominently due to demographic changes and the increased pressure for greater cost efficiency.